How To Setup A Mobile Campaign On AdMob

At the end of this month some big changes are going to be happening over at AdMob. Google made the announcement that starting October 1st you’ll need to use their Adwords platform to reach website distribution on mobile devices. While the exact nature of the changes is still uncertain you should definitely take advantage of the AdMob platform as we know it… I personally started using AdMob back in 2009 as they were one of the firsts to have exclusive self-serving technology that works closely with webmasters to embed advertisements on mobile versions of their sites as well as application developers to monetize their software.

Since 2009 a lot has changed as the number of mobile optimized affiliate offers have increased, traffic volume has picked up, and of course competition is growing daily. Being one of the first big players in the mobile marketing industry, AdMob was acquired by Google, but they’re still using their original platform (I look for this to change in the coming months). Anyways their website touts that they server over 606,924,114,560 global impressions and counting (WOW)…

Once you create your AdMob account and login you’ll notice a fairly basic user interface that allows you to monitor existing campaigns and create new campaigns. Much like many ‘website based’ advertising networks the pricing is determined by a real-time bidding platform where advertisers are rewarded for high CTRs (a business model proven successful in the online advertising industry).

Many of the same features you’re already familiar with exist such as campaign start/end time scheduling, daily budget capping, pacing/accelerated delivery, and ad group sorting.

Before you can begin creating your advertisement you have to define a goal for the ad group. Here are your choices:

For promoting mobile-optimized affiliate marketing campaigns you would select ‘website’ as you’re going to be sending traffic to a standard HTML page that’s been formatted for mobile devices.

You then begin your targeting based on device:

I personally like to test my affiliate link on the iPhone and Android operating systems. You can play around with the others but these are my favorite .

Targeting continues with geography and operators (the source of the Internet gateway):

Finally, you’re able to target based off demographics:

Based off my mobile marketing experience the demographic targeting still needs a good bit of work, so don’t put all your trust in these options. Use them as an advantage, but don’t look THAT much into them.

Your ad text can only contain 35 characters, but you can also upload a 38×38 image and a 72×72 image. The image size delivered depends on the publisher’s implementation:

As of right now the minimum bid in the United States is $0.05 and oddly enough, click prices are higher overseas (I would guess due to less volume).

AdMob also allows you to target based on ‘publisher channel.’ This is the category the publisher listed their website/application in when they were given the AdMob code. As with the demographics, use this as a tool, but don’t rely 100% on this:

Obviously they do have a set of Editorial Guidelines that you need to read and fully understand before you spend a bunch of time creating advertisements. I’ve thrown a lot out there in this post… My advice is to get out there, start creating some campaigns, and start optimizing the results. As I said in the beginning of the post, there’s no telling how much everything is going to change in a few weeks. We also talk in more detail about this inside the Community. Good luck!